If you are tempted to replace your website using a bespoke content management solution, rather than using an off-the-shelf Content Management System (CMS), think again … and choose a CMS.
The advantages of using a CMS are numerous:
And CMSs don’t need to be expensive - there are a number of free or low cost CMSs - examples include Drupal, Joomla! and Plone. There are also some good resources for further investigations such as CMS Review, CMS Watch and the CMS Matrix.
Many organisations struggle over the best place for IT within the organisation and extracting the best business value from investment.
In his recent book, fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology
He also concludes that there shouldn’t be CIOs. Rather, there should be an individual (a Chief Internal Investment Officer) whose job it is to lead the internal investment portfolio, including all resulting business change, and be accountable for the value the organisation gets out of its investments.
Whilst agreeing with much of what Chris Potts says, the aspect this doesn’t consider is the role that IT has in innovation - bringing radically different ways of working to the organisation; not something that will generally come from within existing business units. The most obvious examples of this are Amazon in retail and Google with advertising (although innovation isn’t always as ground breaking as this).
Being told that your business is going to be transformed sounds scary. Transformation is the sort of word that sounds frightening and fraught with risk when you’re told it is going to happen to you, … and celebratory looking back at your achievements.
When broken down into a sequence of small steps, though, it can be achieved with little risk.
Take The Guardian for example. The Guardian wanted to transform its business by moving the Guardian Unlimited news website onto a new content management platform to provide a more attractive offering to users, provide them much more flexibility in managing their content and give them improved opportunities for advertising.
A similar story is true at the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT). 5 years ago, as Jane Scott Paul, the AAT’s Chief Executive said recently, they set out a plan to transform themselves into an organisation that is attractive to their target audience - their members - to enable them to access the vast majority of information and services online.
In both cases, rather than take a “big bang” approach to transformation, they have approached it in a series of small, incremental steps. The advantage of this is that the financial exposure and general risk is significantly reduced and there is early assessment of the real business benefits.
So, the key to business transformation without the fright factor is incremental implementation. This reduces both financial exposure and risk, and allows the transformation to be validated (and adjusted if necessary) throughout the process - a classic application of agile techniques.